Enid : You know, we need to find a place where you can go to meet women who share your interests.
Seymour : Well maybe I don’t want to meet someone who shares my interests. I hate my interests.
This begs the question. Is the number of times you have been born a signed or unsigned integer?
Hell, why are we even assuming it’s an integer. What’s to say you weren’t born 0.331517718 times?
I was at a track meet once and the lady running high jump was doing a horrible job. She was finally figuring out what she was doing and said : OK, we got this. Next height will be 5’12"
And yet every time we suggest switching to metric the very vocal minority claims it’s all actually very easy and switching wouldn’t be worth the hassle anyway. We’d actually save money if we switched to metric, by reducing the number of errors caused by bad measurements, but whatever, kermudgeons gonna kermudgeon.
So it’s all super weird, but not as hard as it sounds. How often do you need to convert between feet and miles anyways? We don’t really use yards for anything, converting between inches and feet is the length conversion that’s obnoxious
It’s very human though, they apparently picked a giant when they standardized it… It still roughly works
An inch is the last joint on your thumb, a foot is your foot length, a yard is a stride (one step with each foot), a mile is 1k strides.
It takes 20 minutes to walk a mile at a normal pace, a healthy person can consistently travel about 20 miles in a day. 10k steps is 5 miles, the somewhat arbitrary goal we picked for pedometers.
It’s weird, but it feels very natural when talking about the physical world around you. It’s a great measure of distance, but it’s not a good measure of length
This makes me think of a friend’s child years ago, who was going around asking all the adults, “how tall are you for your height?”
Which was met with confusion, and the child asking more and more emphatically. I think what the kid was trying to get at was, “are you tall for your age?”.
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